![Parasite: A Film Built Out Of Stairs](https://cdn.slatesource.com/8/d/d/8ddf78d6-c034-4454-b14b-6774f4b3e362.webp)

# Parasite: A Film Built Out Of Stairs

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/parasite-a-film-built-out-of-stairs)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Sep 17, 2026

## The Architecture Is The Plot

Bong Joon-ho pitched Parasite as a story about two families and gave his production designer one instruction that organises everything: the camera should always know how far above or below street level it is. The Kim family's semi basement has a window at pavement height, so the world arrives as feet and tyres and the occasional drunk. The Park family's house, built from scratch as a set on an empty lot, is reached by climbing. Every important turn in the plot is a movement up or down a staircase, and the film asks you to keep count. Bong called it a comedy without clowns and a tragedy without villains, and he meant it literally. Nobody here does anything a person in their position would not plausibly do. The catastrophe is structural, and the one thing no amount of climbing can fix is the smell that follows you up.

journey·6 Scenes

# Watching Parasite

Pull

/

Scene

The Semi Basement

Below

"A family of four folds pizza boxes for piece rates and hunts a neighbour's wifi signal from the highest corner of a half sunken flat."

Runtime

132 minutes

Director

Bong Joon-ho

Budget

$13.2 million

Box office

$263 million worldwide

Cinematography

Hong Kyung-pyo

> Once you overcome the one inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.

Production designer Lee Ha-jun built both houses, and the Park garden was a full outdoor set with a water tank underneath it so the flood could be staged to the centimetre.

Jung Jae-il scores the first half as baroque chamber music, flattering the con exactly the way the con flatters itself, then abandons the family in the second.

🏠🌧️🏆21.05.2019 – 09.02.2020

21.05.2019Cannes. Wins the Palme d'Or on a unanimous jury vote, a first for a Korean film.

21.05.2019

30.05.2019Seoul. Opens in Korea and sells more than ten million tickets.

30.05.2019

11.10.2019New York and Los Angeles. Three screens, the best per screen average of the year.

11.10.2019

05.01.2020Beverly Hills. Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, and the one inch barrier speech that framed the rest of the campaign.

05.01.2020

09.02.2020Los Angeles. Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature. The first film not in English to win Best Picture in ninety two years of the award.

09.02.2020

[Parasite on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6751668/?utm_source=slatesource)